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Rebecca Gordon | The Fire Next Time: Climate Change, the Bomb, or the Flame of Hope?
Rebecca Gordon, TomDispatch
Gordon writes: "If you live in California, you're likely to be consumed on occasion by thoughts of fire."
If I were a religious man (which I’m not), I’d say that it was little short of a miracle. After all, from the spear to the crossbow, the flintlock rifle to the fighter-bomber, humanity has been known, historically, for quickly adopting and using any new weaponry created. Nuclear arms should be considered the miraculous exception. Yes, at the end of World War II, the U.S. took out two Japanese cities in a devastating fashion with two atomic bombs, but three-quarters of a century has now passed and, though such weaponry has spread from the United States to eight other countries, no nuclear weapon has ever again been used. And that’s true, despite regular predictions to the contrary like, for instance, the recent suggestion of Vice Admiral Charles Richard, the head of the U.S. Strategic Command, that a nuclear war with China or Russia is a “real possibility” in the near future — that “a regional crisis” with either of those countries “could escalate quickly to a conflict involving nuclear weapons.”
Similarly, consider it a miracle that nuclear-armed India and Pakistan, often seemingly at the edge of war, have never gone nuclear in a regional conflict that could put enough smoke and soot particulates into the atmosphere to cause a global nuclear winter. In such a case, it’s estimated, somewhere between one and two billion inhabitants of this planet could die (mainly from crop failures and starvation).
Similarly, consider it a sort of miracle in reverse that humanity, which once left the very idea of Armageddon to the gods, has now found at least two ways of producing such ultimate havoc on this planet, nuclear weapons and climate change (and that’s without considering pandemics). Even more curiously, the United States, with the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet, continues to plough staggering amounts of money into what it proudly calls its “nuclear triad” of bombers, submarines, and long-range missiles.
It’s strange to think that humanity has, in a sense, been eternally asking for it. Today, TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon considers the ultimate strangeness of that very reality and the context for it, while the rest of us await a miracle. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
The Fire Next Time
Climate Change, the Bomb, or the Flame of Hope?
f you live in California, you’re likely to be consumed on occasion by thoughts of fire. That’s not surprising, given that, in last year alone, actual fires consumed over four and a quarter million acres of the state, taking with them 10,488 structures, 33 human lives, and who knows how many animals. By the end of this January, a month never before even considered part of the “fire” season, 10 wildfires had already burned through 2,337 more acres, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CalFire).
With each passing year, the state’s fire season arrives earlier and does greater damage. In 2013, a mere eight years ago, fires consumed about 602,000 acres and started significantly later. That January, CalFire reported only a single fire, just two in February, and none in March. Fire season didn’t really begin until April and had tapered off before year’s end. This past December, however, 10 fires still burned at least 10,000 acres. In fact, it almost doesn’t make sense to talk about a fire “season” anymore. Whatever the month, wildfires are likely to be burning somewhere in the state.
Clearly, California’s fires (along with Oregon’s and Washington’s) are getting worse. Just as clearly, notwithstanding Donald Trump’s exhortations to do a better job of “raking” our forests, climate change is the main cause of this growing disaster.
Fortunately, President Joe Biden seems to take the climate emergency seriously. In just his first two weeks in office, he’s cancelled the Keystone XL pipeline project, forbidden new drilling for oil or gas on public lands, and announced a plan to convert the entire federal fleet of cars and trucks to electric vehicles. Perhaps most important of all, he’s bringing the U.S. back into the Paris climate accords, signaling an understanding that a planetary crisis demands planetwide measures and that the largest carbon-emitting economies should be leading the way. “This isn’t [the] time for small measures,” Biden has said. “We need to be bold.”
Let’s just hope that such boldness has arrived in time and that the Biden administration proves unwilling to sacrifice the planet on an altar of elusive congressional unity and illusionary bipartisanship.
Another Kind of Fire
If climate change threatens human life as we know it, so does another potential form of “fire” — the awesome power created when a nuclear reaction converts matter to energy. This is the magic of Einstein’s observation that e=mc2, or that the energy contained in a bit of matter is equal to its mass (roughly speaking, its weight) multiplied by the speed of light squared expressed in meters per second. Roughly speaking, as we’ve all known since August 6, 1945, when an atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, that’s an awful lot of energy. When a nuclear reaction is successfully controlled, the energy can be regulated and used to produce electricity without emitting carbon dioxide in the process.
Unfortunately, while nuclear power plants don’t add greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere, they do create radioactive waste, some of which remains deadly for thousands of years. Industry advocates who argue for nuclear power as a “green” alternative generally ignore the problem — which has yet to be solved — of disposing of that waste.
In what hopefully is just a holdover from the Trump administration, the Energy Department website still “addresses” this issue by suggesting that all the nuclear waste produced to date “could fit on a football field at a depth of less than 10 yards!” The site neglects to add that, if you shoved that 3,456,000 square feet of nuclear waste together the wrong way, the resultant explosive chain reaction would probably wipe out most life on Earth.
Remember, too, that “controlled” nuclear reactions don’t always remain under human control. Ask anyone who lived near the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine, or the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan.
There is, however, another far more devastating form of “controlled” nuclear reaction, the kind created when a nuclear bomb explodes. Only one country has ever deployed atomic weapons in war, of course: the United States, in its attack on Hiroshima and, three days later, on Nagasaki. Those bombs were of the older uranium-based variety and were puny by the standards of today’s nuclear weapons. Still, the horror of those attacks was sufficient to convince many that such weapons should never be used again.
Treaties and Entreaties
In the decades since 1945, various configurations of nations have agreed to treaties prohibiting the use of, or limiting the proliferation of, nuclear weapons — even as the weaponry spread and nuclear arsenals grew. In the Cold War decades, the most significant of these were the bilateral pacts between the two superpowers of the era, the U.S. and the Soviet Union. When the latter collapsed in 1991, Washington signed treaties instead with the Russian Federation government, the most recent being the New START treaty, which came into effect in 2011 and was just extended by Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin.
In addition to such bilateral agreements, the majority of nations on the planet agreed on various multilateral pacts, including the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or NPT, which has been signed by 191 countries and has provided a fairly effective mechanism for limiting the spread of such arms. Today, there are still “only” nine nuclear-armed states. Of these, five are signatories of the NPT: China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and United States. Israel has never publicly acknowledged its growing nuclear arsenal. Three other nuclear-armed countries — India, Pakistan, and North Korea — have never signed the treaty at all. Worse yet, in 2005, the George W. Bush administration inked a side-deal with India that gave Washington’s blessing to the acceleration of that country’s nuclear weapons development program outside the monitoring constraints of the NPT.
The treaty assigns to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) the authority to monitor compliance. It was this treaty, for example, that gave the IAEA the right to inspect Iraq’s nuclear program in the period before the U.S. invaded in 2003. Indeed, the IAEA repeatedly reported that Iraq was, in fact, in compliance with the treaty in the months that preceded the invasion, despite the claims of the Bush administration that Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein had such weaponry. The United States must act, President Bush insisted then, before the “smoking gun” of proof the world demanded turned out to be a “mushroom cloud” over some American city. As became clear after the first few months of the disastrous U.S. military occupation, there simply were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. (At least partly in recognition of the IAEA’s attempts to forestall that U.S. invasion, the agency and its director general, Mohamed El Baradei, would receive the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize.)
Like Iraq, Iran also ratified the NPT in 1968, laying the foundation for ongoing IAEA inspections there. In recent years, having devastated Iraq’s social, economic, and political infrastructure, the United States shifted its concern about nuclear proliferation to Iran. In 2015, along with China, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the European Union, the Obama administration signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), informally known as the Iran nuclear deal.
Under the JCPOA, in return for the lifting of onerous economic sanctions that were affecting the whole population, Iran agreed to limit the development of its nuclear capacity to the level needed to produce electricity. Again, IAEA scientists would be responsible for monitoring the country’s compliance, which by all accounts was more than satisfactory — at least until 2018. That’s when President Donald Trump unilaterally pulled the U.S. out of the agreement and reimposed heavy sanctions. Since then, as its economy began to be crushed, Iran was, understandably enough, reluctant to uphold its end of the bargain.
In the years since 1945, the world has seen treaties signed to limit or ban the testing of nuclear weapons or to cap the size of nuclear arsenals, as well as bilateral treaties to decommission parts of existing ones, but never a treaty aimed at outlawing nuclear weapons altogether. Until now. On January 22, 2021, the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons took effect. Signed so far by 86 countries, the treaty represents “a legally binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons, leading towards their total elimination,” according to the U.N. Sadly, but unsurprisingly, none of the nine nuclear powers are signatories.
“Fire and Fury”
I last wrote about nuclear danger in October 2017 when Donald Trump had been in the White House less than a year and, along with much of the world, I was worried that he might bungle his way into a war with North Korea. Back then, he and Kim Jong-un had yet to fall in love or to suffer their later public breakup. Kim was still “Little Rocket Man” to Trump, who had threatened to “rain fire and fury like the world has never seen” on North Korea.
The world did, in the end, survive four years of a Trump presidency without a nuclear war, but that doesn’t mean he left us any safer. On the contrary, he took a whole series of rash steps leading us closer to nuclear disaster:
- He pulled the U.S. out of the JCPOA, thereby destabilizing the Iran nuclear agreement and reigniting Iran’s threats (and apparent efforts toward) someday developing nuclear weapons.
- He withdrew from the 1987 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty between the U.S. and the Soviet Union (later the Russian Federation), which, according to the nonpartisan Arms Control Association,
“required the United States and the Soviet Union to eliminate and permanently forswear all of their nuclear and conventional ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers. The treaty marked the first time the superpowers had agreed to reduce their nuclear arsenals, eliminate an entire category of nuclear weapons, and employ extensive on-site inspections for verification.”
- He withdrew from the Open Skies Treaty, which gave signatories permission to fly over each other’s territories to identify military installations and activities. Allowing this kind of access was meant to contribute to greater trust among nuclear-armed nations.
- He threatened to allow the New START Treaty to expire, should he be reelected.
- He presided over a huge increase in spending on the “modernization” of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, including on new submarine- and land-based launching capabilities. A number of these programs are still in their initial stages and could be stopped by the Biden administration.
In January 2021, after four years of Trump, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists adjusted its “Doomsday Clock,” moving the minute hand forward, to a mere 100 seconds to midnight. Since 1947, that Clock’s annual resetting has reflected how close, in the view of the Bulletin’s esteemed scientists and Nobel laureates, humanity has come to ending it all. As the Bulletin’s editors note, “The Clock has become a universally recognized indicator of the world’s vulnerability to catastrophe from nuclear weapons, climate change, and disruptive technologies in other domains.”
Why so close to midnight? The magazine lists a number of reasons, including the increased danger of nuclear war, due in large part to steps taken by the United States in the Trump years, as well as to the development of “hypersonic” missiles, which are supposed to fly at five times the speed of sound and so evade existing detection systems. (Trump famously referred to these “super-duper” weapons as “hydrosonic,” a term that actually describes a kind of toothbrush.) There is disagreement among weapons experts about the extent to which such delivery vehicles will live up to the (hyper) hype about them, but the effort to build them is destabilizing in its own right.
The Bulletin points to a number of other factors that place humanity in ever greater danger. One is, of course, the existential threat of climate change. Another is the widespread dissemination of “false and misleading information.” The spread of lies about Covid-19, its editors say, exemplifies the life-threatening nature of a growing “wanton disregard for science and the large-scale embrace of conspiratorial nonsense.” This is, they note, “often driven by political figures and partisan media.” Such attacks on knowledge itself have “undermined the ability of responsible national and global leaders to protect the security of their citizens.”
Passing the (Nuclear) Ball
When Donald Trump announced that he wouldn’t attend the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, few people were surprised. After all, he was still insisting that he’d actually won the election, even after that big lie fueled an insurrectionary invasion of the Capitol. But there was another reason for concern: if Trump was going to be at Mar-a-Lago, how would he hand over the “nuclear football” to the new president? That “football” is, in fact, a briefcase containing the nuclear launch codes, which presidents always have with them. Since the dawn of the nuclear age, it’s been passed from the outgoing president to the new one on Inauguration Day.
Consternation! The problem was resolved through the use of two briefcases, which were simultaneously deactivated and activated at 11:59:59 a.m. on January 20th, just as Biden was about to be sworn in.
The football conundrum pointed to a far more serious problem, however — that the fate of humanity regularly hangs on the actions of a single individual (whether as unbalanced as Donald Trump or as apparently sensible as Joe Biden) who has the power to begin a war that could end our species.
There’s good reason to think that Joe Biden will be more reasonable about the dangers of nuclear warfare than the narcissistic idiot he succeeds. In addition to agreeing to extend the New START treaty, he’s also indicated a willingness to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal and criticized Trump’s nuclear buildup. Nevertheless, the power to end the world shouldn’t lie with one individual. Congress could address this problem, by (as I suggested in 2017) enacting “a law that would require a unanimous decision by a specified group of people (for example, officials like the secretaries of state and defense together with the congressional leadership) for a nuclear first strike.”
The Fire Next Time?
“God gave Noah the rainbow sign
No more water but the fire next time”
These words come from the African-American spiritual “I Got a Home in that Rock.” The verse refers to God’s promise to Noah in Genesis, after the great flood, never again to destroy all life on earth, a promise signified by the rainbow.
Those who composed the hymn may have been a bit less trusting of God — or of human destiny — than the authors of Genesis, since the Bible account says nothing about fire or a next time. Sadly, recent human history suggests that there could indeed be a next time. If we do succeed in destroying ourselves, it seems increasingly likely that it will be by fire, whether the accelerating heating of the globe over decades, or a nuclear conflagration any time we choose. The good news, the flame of hope, is that we still have time — at least 100 seconds — to prevent it.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel Frostlands (the second in the Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes and is now at work on a new book on the history of torture in the United States.
Capitol Hill has had high security since Jan. 6. (photo: Sarah Silbiger/Getty)
Trump's Political Operation Paid More Than $3.5 Million to January 6 Organizers
Anna Massoglia, OpenSecrets
Massoglia writes: "As former President Donald Trump faces a Senate impeachment trial on charges of inciting attacks on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, unanswered questions about the full extent of his ties to a nearby rally the same day highlight the need for more campaign finance transparency."
Newly identified payments in recent Federal Election Commission filings show people involved in organizing the protests on Jan. 6 received even larger sums from Trump’s 2020 campaign than previously known.
OpenSecrets unearthed more than $3.5 million in direct payments from Trump’s 2020 campaign, along with its joint fundraising committees, to people and firms involved in the Washington, D.C. demonstration before a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol.
Recent FEC filings show at least three individuals listed on permit records for the Washington, D.C. demonstration were on the Trump campaign’s payroll through Nov. 30, 2020.
The Trump campaign paid Event Strategies Inc., a firm named in a permit for the rally that also employed two individuals involved in the demonstration, as recently as Dec. 15, just three weeks before the attacks on the U.S. Capitol. That’s according to the most recent FEC filings covering spending through the end of 2020.
Trump’s role in a rally at the Washington, D.C., Ellipse shortly before the attacks on Jan. 6 is expected to take center stage in the impeachment trial.
But the American public may never know the full extent of the Trump campaign’s payments to organizers involved in the protests. That’s because the campaign used an opaque payment scheme that concealed details of hundreds of millions of dollars in spending by routing payments through shell companies where the ultimate payee is hidden.
Trump’s 2020 campaign and joint fundraising committee, the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, spent more than $771 million through American Made Media Consultants LLC, according to new data analyzed by OpenSecrets. The secretive limited-liability company was created by campaign aides and members of Trump’s inner circle to act as a “clearinghouse” to pay vendors, concealing the campaign’s transactions with those vendors.
The FEC generally does not require campaigns to detail payments vendors make to subcontractors so long as the campaign does not have undue influence over the vendor and the subcontractor does not work under the direction or control of the campaign. But the role individuals in Trump’s inner circle played in creating the limited-liability company through which the campaign routed millions of dollars raises the question of whether the company is truly separate from the campaign. The former president’s son-in-law and White House advisor, Jared Kushner, reportedly helped create the limited-liability company and his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, reportedly sat on its board.
The nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center filed an FEC complaint alleging that the Trump campaign and its joint fundraising committee may have violated federal election reporting rules by “laundering” those funds and concealing details of the campaign’s financial dealings.
During the 2020 election cycle, this payment scheme disguised hundreds of millions of dollars paid to firms acting on behalf of the campaign as well to Trump’s family members. Undisclosed beneficiaries of those payments reportedly included Lara Trump as well as campaign fundraiser Kimberly Guilfoyle, according to the complaint. The full roster of individuals working for Trump’s campaign remains hidden from the American public. Details of those payments, such as the nature of services provided by each individual and the amount of money changing hands, are shrouded in mystery.
The role of nonprofit “dark money” groups that do not disclose their donors in organizing the demonstrations on Jan. 6 only adds to the opacity.
Politically active nonprofits are only required to report limited information about their financial dealings in tax filings more than a year after activities take place — and may be able to keep their funders secret forever. The lack of transparency required of such groups means many details of who they pay and who bankrolls their activities can remain hidden.
The rise of shell companies and politically active nonprofits channeling money from untraceable sources has made political spending harder to trace than ever.
Under the most normal circumstances, disclosure loopholes can be exploited to hide anything from illegal campaign coordination to politicians lining their own pockets.
Lacking enough commissioners to engage in most meaningful actions until December, the sole federal agency tasked with enforcing campaign finance law was largely powerless throughout the 2020 election cycle. With its quorum restored, the FEC can again vote on enforcement matters addressing a backlog of complaints alleging campaign finance violations.
The possibility that a failed presidential candidate’s campaign may have continued bankrolling operatives behind a rally that escalated to violent insurrection raises the question of how this could have been hidden from the American public — and raises the stakes for campaign finance transparency to a new level.
Rashida Tlaib: 'We're working really hard to make sure that much of the vision in the Green New Deal will continue through other policies and we're absolutely thrilled that at least we're moving in that direction, a lot of big steps in the plan.' (photo: Sylvia Jarrus/eyevine)
Rashida Tlaib on Shutoffs, Pollution and Working in a Hostile Congress: 'We Have a Water Crisis in Our Country'
Nina Lakhani, Guardian UK
Lakhani writes: "The 44-year-old Muslim congresswoman from Michigan, re-elected by a landslide last November, must deal with structural and individual racism in Congress while working to represent one of the country's poorest and most diverse districts."
ashida Tlaib’s workplace is a hostile environment.
“There’s always a sense that some colleagues don’t want me to exist in this institution, but [also] that this institution wasn’t built for someone like myself to be here. As soon as I got here I felt it … [Congress] wasn’t ready for me nor were many colleagues who continue to enable an institution to exist where a woman of Muslim faith, a Palestinian, a child of immigrants, is not seen as equal.”
Tlaib was first elected in 2018, and, together with fellow Democrat Ilhan Omar from Minnesota, became one of the first two Muslim women to serve in Congress – almost 230 years after the legislature was founded.
Tlaib and Omar joined forces with two other progressive first-timers, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley, to push for transformational structural changes to eradicate racial inequalities in health, housing, immigration, education, jobs and the environment.
As a result, members of the so-called “Squad” sometimes clashed with old-school party leadership and were attacked by Trump and his allies who used thinly veiled racist rhetoric to stir up hatred against the women of color inside and outside Washington.
The drip drip of everyday hostility ramped up after the attack on the Capitol on 6 January by a pro-Trump mob egged on by the Republican senators Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and others, including Trump himself. The attackers included people waving Confederate flags and members of far-right racist groups.
“The attack on the Capitol is a constant thought. I cannot walk around this complex without a sense of fear, and what angers many of us but also creates sadness, is that this could have been avoided. The attack happened because we have not faced the ills of our nation, we’ve not taken a serious look at white supremacy in our country … these attacks happen in communities of color day after day and will continue to happen without intentional aggressive action to stop these violent groups.”
“People are traumatized because of hate, bigotry and lies,” said Tlaib.
Hostile work conditions can lead to stress, health problems and burnout, but Tlaib insists that the Squad – which has since added two more members in Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman – will not be intimidated or silenced despite racism and falsehoods from new colleagues such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Republican conspiracy theorist and Trump loyalist from Georgia.
“It can be extremely difficult, but I try to outwork the hate … [to focus on] on getting millions of Americans access to water and pushing back against corporate greed that wants to privatise that water. I try to expose the white supremacy and structural racism within policies that allow my neighbors to live in poverty, their children to live among blight, schools closings and dirty water. I’m here to speak truth and use this office to elevate some of those truths.”
“And even though I’m here with my bullhorn, many, many want to rip that bullhorn from my hands and bully me through their racist comments and actions. This place wasn’t built for me, but we’re here, we’re not going anywhere, we’re growing,” she added.
For Tlaib, it’s the harsh reality of environmental racism endured by so many of her constituents that drives her to push for change in Washington.
She represents Michigan’s 13th congressional district, which includes the city of Detroit and the state’s most polluted zip code thanks to a toxic mix of contaminants spewing out of every industrial plant imaginable – steel mills, coal-fired power plants, gas flares, a salt mine, a wastewater treatment plant and a huge oil refinery.
Here, in the south-west outskirts of the city, mostly black low-income households suffer disproportionate rates of the whole gamut of medical conditions including cancers, asthma, heart disease, miscarriages, birth defects and cognitive impairments. Air pollution kills more people in Detroit than gun violence, and has probably contributed to the high Covid death toll.
Tlaib, like many other progressives who endorsed Bernie Sanders in the Democratic presidential candidate race, said she was pleasantly surprised by Biden’s environmental justice and economic recovery plan. The ambitious clean energy blueprint includes key elements of the Green New Deal, which Biden refused to endorse by name, such as tough action on corporate polluters and promises that 40% of clean energy investment will be in frontline communities like Tlaib’s, which have for so long been treated like sacrifice zones.
She recalled one constituent, an elderly woman of color, saying that it felt like the government greenlighted companies that profited from poisoning the community.
“We are so incredibly thrilled that there’s aggressive language about halting investment in fossil fuels. Of course I want to see more – we’re working really hard to make sure that much of the vision in the Green New Deal will continue through other policies and we’re absolutely thrilled that at least we’re moving in that direction, a lot of big steps in the plan.”
Tlaib credits veteran environmental justice advocates for making sure racial justice is at the heart of Biden’s clean energy plan.
Detroit is also where America’s water affordability scandal first emerged in 2014 after the city implemented a mass shutoff program leaving tens of thousands of mostly low-income black residents without running water due to unpaid bills – a policy the UN described as “contrary to human rights”.
Almost four in 10 Detroit residents live in poverty, the highest rate among the 20 largest US cities. Water rates have increased by as much as 400% in the last 20 years.
A landmark investigation by the Guardian last year found that spiraling water rates over the past decade have left millions of Americans facing shutoffs and foreclosures.
Tlaib realised the affordability crisis was unfolding in her backyard after reading a story about an elderly couple, using melted snow they collected in buckets to flush the toilet. “I just thought that was wrong and inhumane especially in one of the wealthiest countries in the world. How can we let people live like this? People have been left without safe, clean, affordable water simply because they cannot afford the increased water rates … it’s dehumanising.”
Detroit was the first place to order a moratorium on water shutoffs last year in an effort to curtail the spread of the highly infectious coronavirus, but at least 186 million Americans are at risk of losing their water supply for overdue bills.
Last month, Tlaib and fellow Michigan congresswoman Debbie Dingell reintroduced the Emergency Water is a Human Right Act, which would mandate a national moratorium on shutoffs and create a $1.5bn fund for states and tribes to use for struggling low-income households to ensure taps stay on during the pandemic.
“People are getting public health guidance to wash their hands for 20 seconds but don’t have running water. I am their lobbyist. I don’t have corporate experience but I have their stories and the human impact on their lives and I’m trying to bring this to the attention of President Biden and Vice-President Harris.
The legislation would require utilities which benefit from federal aid to reconnect disconnected households. Before the pandemic, one in 20 households were disconnected for unpaid bills annually, according to research by Food and Water Watch.
In sharp contrast, federal aid to help low-income households pay energy bills has been around for years – in part thanks to corporate lobbying, says Tlaib. Water, on the other hand, is still mostly provided by public utilities, though advocates warn that small, struggling systems are being gobbled up by private firms.
“We have not been as aggressive about access to water as we should have been … my biggest worry is that it may be intentional because the hope is to privatize it, hand it over to for-profit corporations where the problem will get 10 times worse,” Tlaib said.
America’s water crisis is not just about affordability. It’s also about safety with chemicals such as lead, PFAS, nitrates and many others contaminating drinking water sources nationwide. The problems are interrelated: federal investment in water systems peaked in 1977, leaving public utilities increasingly reliant on customer revenue to pay for infrastructure upgrades and climate mitigation costs.
Tlaib recognises that the proposed bill, which she says has the support of the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer (and Harris when she was a senator), is a short-term solution to a complex, worsening problem.
“We have a water crisis in our country. We have to get to the root cause of water affordability and water shutoffs, but they [Biden and Harris] are so focused on the pandemic that they must move with a sense of urgency to create this fund so that we can stop the hemorrhaging … My long-term goal is to make sure water stays accessible.”
Police and security forces attempt to hold back a mob of pro-Trump extremists as they storm the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Wednesday. (photo: Roberto Schmidt/Getty)
The Jan 6 Images Were Already Disturbing. The Impeachment-Trial Video Makes Them Terrifying.
Margaret Sullivan, The Washington Post
Sullivan writes: "The pounding on the Capitol doors, the shouts of the mob, police officers screaming in pain, barricades toppled, windows shattered, the deadly gunshot."
Captured in fragments on cellphone videos and security cameras during the failed insurrection on Jan. 6, these sounds and images are more than a month old now. Many of them had been uploaded and broadcast and retweeted millions of times before House impeachment managers presented them in a 13-minute video compilation Tuesday at the beginning of former president Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial.
By modern standards, the footage is ancient.
So you would think that its power would have waned by now. That the impact of those horrible sounds and images would have faded through sheer repetition.
Instead, every second seemed as terrifying as the day it was recorded. More so, in fact.
“This is still completely unbelievable and so traumatizing,” PBS White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor tweeted as she watched it.
Vanity Fair writer Joe Hagan wrote, “This is making me ill.”
What is it about the Jan. 6 footage that defies the thermodynamic law of the Internet age, that makes it grow more compelling with time?
I suspect it’s because not until Tuesday’s presentation — a simply produced, chronological sequence of stomach-churning sights and sounds — did anyone have a chance to process what the clips showed. Before the video, the footage had existed merely as a jumble of disaggregated clips, dumped onto social media after the attack, then looped endlessly on cable news and phone screens.
Now, we could finally see context. We could see cause and effect.
Here was President Trump at his rally near the White House, lighting the fuse for the riot with a lie-filled speech about election theft and taking back the country, promising to march with the mob to the Capitol.
Here was Vice President Pence entering the Senate chamber a couple of miles away at almost the same time, nodding to the lawmakers preparing to certify the election results.
And here was the mob: pounding on doors, breaking through windows. Here was a police officer crushed in a doorway, blood pouring down his face. Here was another officer, Eugene Goodman, bravely making himself into a decoy to lure the rioters away from their targets. And now the gunfire — the moment where an officer shot one of Trump’s true believers, Ashli Babbitt, as she tried to vault through a barricaded window to enter the Speaker’s Lobby just yards away from the lawmakers.
And later — far too late — here was Trump finally telling his insurrectionists to go home, assuring them that he loved them, that they were “very special.” And still later in a tweet, urging them to “Remember this day forever!”
Set down in a straightforward timeline, the cellphone clips began to form something understandable, if not remotely sensible.
And part of what was understood was this: As bad as the attack was, it could easily have turned into a complete bloodbath.
Speaking afterward, Trump’s defense attorney David Schoen tried to buffer the video’s gut punch. He said it was too slick — a Hollywoodesque flick spliced and diced into something “to chill and horrify you.”
In fact, the video succeeded by doing the opposite. It reassembled shards and snippets into something whole.
Some Republican senators tried to avert their gaze. Rand Paul doodled on a pad of lined paper and Rick Scott tried to busy himself with paperwork, The Washington Post reported. Tom Cotton and Marco Rubio, too, turned away from the obvious, irrefutable truth on the screen: that Congress had been attacked by a mob inflamed by the president of the United States.
It’s not possible for the rest of us to look away, though. And every time we look, it only gets worse.
Democrats deliver the article of impeachment to the Senate. (photo: Getty)
ALSO SEE: Watch the Dramatic Video of the Capitol
Riot Shown During Trump's Impeachment Trial
Impeachment Managers to Show Never-Before-Seen Footage of Capitol Attack
Kyle Cheney and Andrew Desiderio, Politico
Excerpt: "House Democrats prosecuting Donald Trump for igniting the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol say they will prove that the former president's incitement occurred in three stages: Provoking his supporters, kick-starting the attack and sitting on his hands while the violence proliferated."
Prosecutors also will show never-before-seen footage of the chaos during the first day of formal arguments in Trump's second trial.
“He told them to fight like hell, and they brought us hell that day,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the lead House impeachment manager, as the House opened its formal trial arguments on the Senate floor Wednesday.
“This case is not about blaming an innocent bystander. This is about holding accountable the personal singularly responsible for this attack,” Raskin added, referring to Trump as the “inciter-in-chief.”
The arguments kicked off a two-day presentation by Democrats seeking to persuade at least 17 Senate Republicans to join in convicting Trump, a tall task that appears unlikely to succeed in the trial’s early stages.
Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.), another impeachment manager, initiated the arguments by laying out a post-election chronology of Trump's comments and actions seeking to undermine confidence in the 2020 election results. He played a series of clips of Trump vowing to “never surrender” in his fight to flip the election outcome.
“People listened. Armed supporters surrounded election officials’ homes. The secretary of state for Georgia got death threats. Officials warned the president that his rhetoric was dangerous and it was going to result in deadly violence,” Neguse said. “He didn’t stop it. He didn’t condemn the violence. He incited it further.”
That incitement got more specific over time, Neguse said, eventually resulting in his order for supporters to show up in Washington on Jan. 6 at the precise moment Congress was certifying Biden's victory, and to schedule a speech — and order backers to march on the Capitol — just as the votes were beginning to be tallied.
Later, the managers addressed Trump’s false claims of voter fraud head-on, debunking some of the central allegations that fueled the riots and outlining Trump’s weeks-long effort to promote a campaign dubbed “stop the steal.” Inside the Senate chamber, several Democratic senators as well as GOP Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska could be seen shaking their heads as clips played of Trump calling the election “stolen” and “fraudulent.”
The impeachment managers began their opening arguments after aides to the House impeachment team said Wednesday morning that the prosecutors plan to introduce never-before-seen footage of the riots.
The footage, which may be drawn from Capitol security cameras and other sources, will shed light on the rioters’ “extreme violence” from a new vantage point, aides to the House impeachment team said. It’s part of what Democrats maintain will be an overwhelming display of evidence that Trump directly fueled the deadly insurrection and committed “the most heinous constitutional crime possible.”
“The easiest trials to try are the trials where you have the goods. We have the goods,” said a senior aide to the House impeachment team.
According to aides, the brand new footage will also underscore the risk that the violence could have spiraled further “but for the brave action of the officers” securing the building even when they were outnumbered by a pro-Trump mob.
The managers’ use of video footage underscores a central theme of their trial strategy — to make senators re-live the horrors of Jan. 6 and the raw emotions that come with it. One of the managers’ aides said the team is still convinced that it can marshal the power of those moments to “move hearts, minds, the consciences of 100 jurors,” even as an acquittal seems exceedingly likely.
Wednesday’s argument will also focus on the weeks before the Jan. 6 insurrection, when the managers say Trump primed his base with false claims that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him. The managers intend to show that the violence of last month’s insurrection was the “foreseeable” result of Trump’s rhetoric, aides said.
They will also argue that Trump’s remarks on Jan. 6 to a group of his supporters, urging them to march on the Capitol and “fight like hell” to stop Joe Biden’s presidency, were “filled with meaning” — and directed at a group he knew included “folks with violent backgrounds.”
The Democrats are taking heart from the unexpected decision of Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) to support their case that the trial is constitutional. Cassidy, who praised the House managers’ presentations on Tuesday, was the only senator whose vote was not forecast in advance.
On Tuesday, the trial’s first official day, the managers played a lengthy montage on the Senate floor that intertwined Trump’s words and tweets with the violent actions of the rioters. Even some of the Republicans who voted to declare the trial unconstitutional said they were moved by the videos — an acknowledgment that the trial’s jury pool witnessed and was a victim of the insurrection.
The Senate ultimately voted to uphold its constitutional authority to put a former president on trial, with six Republicans joining all 50 Democrats in the vote. The managers plan to urge Republicans in particular to divorce their concerns about the constitutionality of the trial from the merits of the House’s case against Trump. With the procedural question already settled, House Democrats are hoping that more than six Republicans will agree with them on the substance of their arguments.
The aides also indicated that Democrats expect to use less than the full 16 hours of argument time they have been allotted, a nod to the concerns they have shown about preventing repetitiveness and lulling the Senate into boredom. They added that all nine impeachment managers selected by Speaker Nancy Pelosi will participate in the arguments.
Democrats also intend to use their opening arguments to guard against what they expect to hear from the Trump defense team when it presents its case on Friday and Saturday. Trump’s team argues that his words to the Jan. 6 crowd were protected by the First Amendment and that the rioters who breached the Capitol did so of their own accord, not with Trump’s urging or blessing.
The Trump team’s arguments were marred Tuesday by a rambling performance from lead attorney Bruce Castor, whose hour-long presentation was roundly panned by senators from both parties. But most Senate Republicans are predisposed to acquitting Trump and appeared poised to overlook the weaknesses of the Trump team’s case in the early stages of the trial.
The impeachment managers got some timely help Wednesday from Atlanta-area prosecutors who, according to a New York Times report, have decided to launch a criminal investigation of Trump's effort in December to pressure Georgia's secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to "find" enough votes to help him win the state's presidential election.
That episode, captured in an audio recording that was released by the Washington Post last month, figured in the House's case against Trump— part of what they said was a prolonged effort by Trump to wrest the election from Biden and claim a second term.
Jovenel Moïse speaks at his inauguration ceremony after taking the oath of office, Port-au-Prince, February 7, 2017. (photo: Igor Rugwiza/UN)
The Foreign Roots of Haiti's "Constitutional Crisis"
Mark Schuller, NACLA
Schuller writes: "Haiti's president's term has come to an end, but he refuses to step down."
Solidarity is urgent.
s per usual, news on Haiti in the United States remains limited, except for during periods of “crisis.” As if on cue, U.S. media began reporting on Haiti’s “constitutional crisis” this week.
Sunday, February 7 is the end of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse’s term, according to the constitution. He refuses to step down. This week, the opposition called for a two-day general strike, uniting around a transition with the head of Haiti’s Supreme Court stepping in.
Most reporting failed to note the international role, and particularly that of the United States, in creating this “crisis.” And nearly all focused only on one segment of the opposition: leaders of Haiti’s political parties.
Predictably, foreign media led their stories with violence. True, the security situation is deteriorating: Nou Pap Dòmi denounced 944 killings in the first eight months of 2020. But leaving the discussion at “gang violence” whitewashes its political dimensions: on January 22, leaders of the so-called “G9” (the group of 9), a federation of gangs led by former police officer Jimmy Chérisier, alias “Barbecue,” held a march in defense of the Haitian president. National Network for the Defence of Human Rights (RNDDH) reported in August 2020 that the government federated the gangs in the first place.
This “gangsterization” occurred without parliamentary sanction. On January 13, 2020—a day after the 10th anniversary of Haiti’s devastating earthquake—parliament’s terms ended, leaving President Moïse to rule by decree. One such decree came in November as the wave of kidnapping increased: the president outlawed some forms of protest, calling it “terrorism.”
Readers in the United States should not need to be reminded of white supremacists’ violent attack on Congress and the U.S. Constitution on January 6 that killed at least six people, on the heels of coup attempts in Michigan and other vigilante attacks. In the United States, police killed 226 Black people last year. The irony of U.S. officials opining on violence, democracy, or the rule of law is apparently invisible to some readers.
In addition to parallels of state violence against Black people in the United States and Haiti, missing from most stories is context about the specific roles played by previous U.S. administrations—from both parties—in fomenting and increasing that violence.
Haiti’s ruling Tèt Kale party got its start in 2011, when bawdy carnival singer Michel Martelly was muscled into the election’s second round by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the United Nations Special Envoy and co-chair of the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission (IHRC) Bill Clinton.
This support from the Clintons, the United States, and the so-called Core Group (including France, Canada, Brazil, the European Union, and the Organization of American States), never wavered, despite the increasingly clear slide toward authoritarianism. In 2012, Martelly installed allied mayors in all but a handful of towns. Then parliament’s terms expired in 2015, the five-year anniversary of the earthquake, with promises of holding elections never materializing. The vote that did finally lead to the election of Martelly’s hand-picked successor, Jovenel Moïse, was fraudulent. Yet the United States and the Core Group continued to play along—and offer financial support—until finally the electoral commission formally called for its annulment. Because of international pressure, the final round was held weeks after Hurricane Matthew ravaged large segments of the country. It was the lowest voter turnout in the country’s history.
Why would so-called “democratic” countries continue to support the Tèt Kale state? What was in it for Empire?
Having to thank his friends in high places, Martelly’s reconstruction effort focused on providing opportunities for foreign capitalist interests to invest in tourism, agribusiness, sweatshops, and mining. Not surprisingly, donors to the Clinton Global Initiative made out like (legal) bandits.* Ironically, $4 billion available to help fund this disaster capitalism was from Venezuela’s PetroCaribe program, which offered low-cost oil and low-interest loans. With the Haitian state safely under the Clintons’ watch, the transformative potential of this alternative to neoliberal globalization and example of South-South solidarity was squandered. Cue foreign mainstream media’s focus solely on “corruption” of this complex movement demanding #KòtKòbPetwoKaribe? Where are the PetroCaribe funds?
This popular movement was an extension of the uprising against International Monetary Fund-imposed austerity. On July 6, 2018, during the World Cup, the Haitian government announced a price hike for petroleum products. Right after Brazil lost the match, the people took to the streets all across the country and shut it down. In Kreyòl, this was the first peyi lòk—a lockdown or general strike.
It was the first time in my 20 years working in Haiti that a mobilization brought together people from every socioeconomic status, at one point reaching two million people across the country (out of a population of 11 million). Faced with this popular swell of dissent, the government increasingly turned to violence, including a massacre in Lasalin, a low-income neighborhood near the port and a stronghold for the party of former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Thinking back to my time in Haiti during the 2003-2004 coup against Aristide and comparing the people on the streets then and now, it seemed likely that Moïse would be forced out by November 2018. Certainly he would be gone by February 7, 2019—two years ago.
So why is he still in office?
Like his predecessor “Sweet Micky,” Martelly’s stage name, the “Banana Man” as Moïse was known during the campaign, had friends in high places. President Donald Trump met with Moïse and other right-of-center hemispheric heads of state at his Mar-a-Lago resort in March 2019. Haiti was crucial in the U.S.-led effort in the OAS to not recognize Nicolás Maduro as the legitimate president of Venezuela. Despite the billions in aid Haiti received from Venezuela through PetroCaribe, and bilateral cooperation that began in 1815 when Haitian president Alexandre Pétion provided crucial arms and support for Simón Bolívar, President Moïse sided with Trump. In 1962, Haitian president “Papa Doc” Duvalier—whom history and solidarity movements judged as a dictator—did the same thing to Cuba, and the United States generously rewarded him.
Given the new White House occupant, and campaign promises to the key battleground state of Florida, one might think that President Joe Biden would reverse course vis-à-vis Haiti. Why, then, would Immigration and Customs Enforcement continue to deport 1,800 people, some not even born in Haiti, sending not one but two deportation flights on February 4 alone?
Making the connections, the Florida-based Family Advocacy Network Movement (FANM) sent an open letter denouncing state violence and violations of human rights.
The voices within Haiti that foreign corporate media amplify are those of political parties. The Kolektif Anakawona outlined at least two other much larger opposition segments connected to grassroots organizing. On November 29, the popular organization coalition Konbit issued a five-language call for solidarity. The workers’ movement Batay Ouvriye outlined popular demands for whomever takes office. A group of professionals, Fowòm Politik Sosyopwofesyonèl Pwogresis Ayisyen (FPSPA), denounced the United Nations for rushing elections and its support for what FPSPA qualifies as a dictatorship. David Oxygène, with the popular organization MOLEGHAF, critiqued the political party consensus as olye yon lit de klas, se yon lit de plas—rather than a class struggle, it’s a struggle for position (power). Both he and activist Nixon Boumba underscore that the opposition plan is a short-term solution, when Haitian movements are asking for long-term solutions and changing the system. Activist-journalist Jean Claudy Aristil and others point out the fundamental hypocrisy and limits of “Western democracy.” Moneyed interests, including imperial powers, who dominate the political process in Haiti are by no accident part of the same transnational capitalist class that has rigged the system in the United States—the model for other political systems in the Americas.
These Haitian activists and scholars are not asking for U.S. intervention in support of what Oxygène called 2 zèl yon menm malfini—two wings of the same vulture.
They are asking for us to dismantle imperial interference and to join them in transforming our institutions so that people-to-people solidarity and a democratic global economy can then be possible.
New York's MTA had 251 micrograms per cubic meter of PM2.5, far beyond the nationally determined save level of 35. (photo: Carlo Allegri/Reuters)
'People Should Be Alarmed': Air Pollution in US Subway Systems Stuns Researchers
Oliver Milman, Guardian UK
Milman writes: "People traveling on subway systems in major US cities are being exposed to unsafe amounts of air pollution, with commuters in New York and New Jersey subjected to the highest levels of pollution, research has found."
Riders in major cities, especially New York, encounter particle quantities well above safe levels
eople traveling on subway systems in major US cities are being exposed to unsafe amounts of air pollution, with commuters in New York and New Jersey subjected to the highest levels of pollution, research has found.
Tiny airborne particles, probably thrown up by train brakes or the friction between train wheels and rails, are rife in the 71 underground stations sampled by researchers during morning and evening rush hours in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia and Washington DC, the cities that contain the bulk of subway systems in the US.
The levels of these tiny specks of pollution, called PM2.5, were well above nationally determined safe daily levels of 35 micrograms per cubic meter in each of the cities. New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) system had 251 micrograms per cubic meter, followed by Washington DC with 145 micrograms per cubic meter. Philadelphia was, comparatively, the cleanest system but still breached the limit beyond which serious health hazards are risked.
“New Yorkers in particular should be concerned about the toxins they are inhaling,” said the study co-author Terry Gordon, a professor at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine, with the research finding that concentrations of hazardous metals and organic particles were anywhere from two to seven times higher than outdoor air samples in the city.
Christopher Street, a Manhattan station that helps connect New York and New Jersey, had an incredible particle pollution level of 1,499 micrograms per cubic meter, about 77 times higher than the above-ground pollution. This is a pollution level more commonly found near a large wildfire or during a building demolition, the researchers said.
“It was the worst pollution ever measured in a subway station, higher than some of the worst days in Beijing or Delhi,” said Gordon, who said he was so amazed by the readings on his instruments he had to ask colleagues to conduct repeated tests to ensure the figures were correct. “It just wasn’t believable. My colleague went down there and his airways were feeling tight after an hour or so.”
The researchers calculated that someone making a typical commute to and from Christopher Street was increasing their risk of an adverse cardiovascular event by 10%. But the station wasn’t the only one with elevated airborne toxins, with Broadway in Boston, Second Avenue in New York City and 30th Street in Philadelphia among the most polluted stops in the US north-east. “People should be highly alarmed by these high levels,” Gordon said.
The subway systems typically shuttle millions of people around the US cities, with New York’s MTA, the country’s largest, conveying 5.5 million people around New York every day in 2019. The use of subways has plummeted during the coronavirus pandemic, however, with many of the remaining commuters those working in frontline essential jobs.
Analysis of the air samples shows that the pollutants were mainly composed of iron and organic carbon, a chemical produced from the breakdown of fossil fuels or decaying plants and animals. The latter has, when inhaled, been linked to an increased risk of respiratory conditions, lung cancer and heart disease. It is not entirely clear why pollution in subways is worse than above ground, although the open air is able to dilute and remove some of the fumes from cars and trucks while underground stations are often poorly ventilated.
Gordon stressed that more research was needed to ascertain the exact health impact upon commuters and transit workers, who spend prolonged time in the polluted stations. The researchers also plan to further explore the exact sources of the pollutants, which can range from the exhaust given by diesel locomotives to dust whipped up from the remains of dead rodents.
“This is an important contribution, especially to our understanding of the disproportionate burden of air pollution faced by low-income communities and communities of color,” said Gretchen Goldman, research director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, who was not involved in the study, which was published in Environmental Health Perspectives.
“As the scientific community works to better understand exposure and potential health effects of air pollution in the urban environment, I hope local decision makers use this valuable work to inform the best ways to address the known racial and socioeconomic inequities in air pollution exposure in US cities.”
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